I Lived Vicariously Through This Show.

In High School Musical 2 Sharpay very clearly states that they have “…Iced tea imported from England, life guards imported from Spain, towels imported from Turkey, and turkey imported from Maine.” In order to import an item, it must come from another country. The series is set in Albequerque, New Mexico, and as New Mexico and Maine are both part of the United States Of America, they cannot have their turkey imported from Maine. As most of the characters are white, and all speak English, this clearly indicates that High School Musical takes place in an alternate universe where a second Civil War has split the nation and New Mexico is no longer part of the Union, based on the fact that we never see the characters celebrate the Fourth of July. In this essay I will

To Brighten Your Day

So, I work at an elementary school.

Today, the instructor was teaching the different variations of Cinderella.  (There’s over 900 recorded, apparently.)

A point she was making was that there is no such thing as a boy story or a girl story-even though media says otherwise-because we should let everyone enjoy whatever stories they want. (Within reason, this was for little kids.)

So, obviously, the little kids at first are like, “NUH UH, THIS IS A GIRL STORY”, but they quickly warm up to it when she says, “You’ve all read dog stories, right?  But shouldn’t only dogs read it, cuz it’s a dog story?” etc.

Anyways.

So, she was like, “So if you see a boy reading a book about...flowers..what do you say?”  To get them to come up with responses for how to deal with that.

But IMMEDIATELY these two little first-grade boys pipe up.

“Hey, I like flowers!”

The kid sitting next to him turns to him.  “Hey, I like flowers, too!”  They grinned at each other.

“Everybody likes flowers.”  And they high-fived.

And the instructor and I are just dying.  A) because it’s super cute.  B) because her point was made and C) we couldn’t have coaxed anything better out of them.

Kids are cute, it made my day so I hope it makes yours, you may continue scrolling.

what are you doing if I break into your house and wake you up in the dead of night and i pull out a shot glass and flask of NyQuil and say to your health and down one (1) shot of it and then pass tf out on the end of your bed like some demented cat

what then huh?

Psych is the perfect example of how the Homestuck relationship quadrants play out irl

Shawn and Gus are moirails. Like, perfect definition.

Shawn and Jules are matesprits. (Duh)

Shawn and Lassie are kismessitudes. With Gus, Jules, and even arguably Chief Vick stepping in as auspistices as needed.

I could write an essay on this, as both a Homestuck and Psych autistic. Argue with the wall, you know I’m right and y’all have just been too afraid to say it

I think about this at least once a week

You brought a cheese knife to the knife fight, which isn’t technically wrong, but is definitely an odd choice

Not only are there stupid questions, but they will cost you.

The respect never leaves

Finding a Conscience

So Volume 7 definitely introduced a whole lot of symbolic elements of Penny’s Pinocchio story.

We’ve gotten a Geppetto (Pietro),

a Blue Fairy (Fria),

a symbolic ‘become a real boy’ transformation, or in this case; an affirmation beyond all doubt that Penny was a real girl all along

And the end of the volume even introduced a Montro.

However, even with all this, I recently realized that there was still a major character from Pinocchio that we still seemed to be lacking.

Jiminy Cricket. Which the more I thought about it seemed pretty odd given that Penny doesn’t seem to NEED someone to be her conscience, after all, she seems to be by far the most moral and empathetic of all the Atlas characters.

But now I’m pretty sure that was exactly the point. Because Penny is the Jiminy Cricket of this story. Rather than having a different character act as her conscience, Penny herself acts as the conscience to others. Namely, Ironwood, Winter and the rest of Atlas.

All of Penny’s scenes with Winter from Episode 7 on can pretty much be summed up as Penny playing the role of Jiminy Cricket.

Finally, this adds another layer of symbolism to Winter, and by extension Ironwood, forcing Penny to flee Atlas.

Atlas has now effectively rejected their conscience.